MOPSOGAT: Predicting CircRNA-Disease Associations via Improved Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization and Graph Attention Network.

Abstract

Recently increasing researches have discovered that circRNAs are remarkably reliable in organisms and play a crucial role as marker in many diseases. Although deep learning techniques has been universally applied to investigate the relationship of circRNA-disease, optimizing many parameters involved in these techniques for best performance has been a challenge. Therefore, we present, for the first time, a multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm to optimize the parameters in a graph attention network, ensuring that the model operates at peak efficiency. In addition, it also limits feature learning due to uneven distribution of different node types in heterogeneous graphs based on association relationships. We suggest a unique approach, MOPSOGAT, to overcome the aforementioned problems. MOPSOGAT is a method for predicting circRNA-disease associations utilizing the improved multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) and the graph attention network. Initially, we obtain node sequences by utilizing multiple circRNA similarities and disease phenotypic similarities, and employing a heterogeneous graph with random walks incorporating jump and stay strategies. These sequences are then processed using word2vec to derive the neighbor vectors of the nodes, thus providing initial embeddings for circRNAs and diseases. Subsequently, in order to model convergence and diversity of the Pareto front solutions, an improved MOPSO algorithm is used to iteratively search for optimal solutions in the parameter space. After MOPSO optimization, parameters are fed into a graph attention network to further refine the model embedding. As a result, MOPSOGAT performs better than deep learning based methods, solely multi-objective optimization-based methods and machine learning-based ways. Moreover, the potential associations predicted by MOPSOGAT have been validated through case studies, further demonstrating the potential of MOPSOGAT in future biomedical research.